Exhibitions
Throughout the run of the Conference, you can explore a selection of exhibitions which will be hosted by a selection of Galleries within Belfast City Centre
Belfast Exposed Gallery I
Ego Death
Jerwood Awards 2023
Heather Agyepong
Heather Ageponge is British Ghanaian visual artist, performer/actor and maker who lives and works in London. Their practice is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive.
Agyepong is developing ego death, a project inspired by psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of ‘The Shadow’. Exploring techniques including free writing/painting, observation, and self-reflection, Agyepong is developing twelve self-portraits using double exposure to create an arresting new visual language where her shadow characters are revealed. ego death is a project about self-discovery, imperfection, compassion, and radical acceptance.
Belfast Exposed Gallery II
The Lie of the Land
Jerwood Awards 2023
Joanne Coates
Joanne Coates is a working-class visual artist working with the medium of photography. She lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio.
Joanne Coates is creating The Lie of the Land, a body of work that addresses the erasure of contemporary working-class histories and culture in the countryside. Coates works at the intersection of socially engaged practice and traditional British documentary photography. For this commission, she has collaborated with twelve women who identify as working class, living, and working in rural or agricultural settings, and is developing a series of portraits, landscapes, still images and soundscapes that enable them to reflect on their lived experiences.
Belfast Exposed Studio Gallery
A Door, A Frame and the Number 52
Paul McCabe
Paul McCabe is a photographer born and based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he works with photography as a tool to explore his inner thoughts and feelings, the use of symbols are part of McCabe’s journey, through his own struggles of mental health, his photographs are a way of understanding his way of his mind.
'Paul has worked with Belfast Exposed for the past four years to uncover his creative ability to open up his lived experience surrounding his mental health issues. Paul’s talent matches his passion and commitment to creating this though provoking exhibition that demonstrates there are visual ways of communicating. McCabe sharing his story to others is admirable with the aim of supporting others in their recovery is fantastic but also the work is beautiful'.
Belfast Exposed Street View
Refraction of Truth
Teresa Lyle
Teresa Lyle is an artist based in Derry and a recent MFA graduate of Ulster University. Her work focuses on mental illness examining recovery and relapse. Diagnosed with Dysthymia, Teresa has set out to highlight the disorder that is rarely known and shine a light on the difficulties she endures.
A Refraction of Truth confronts mental illness and living with Dysthymia – a long-lasting form of depression. Composed of four parts the series turns the lens onto the everyday and the self, to imagine a universe free from the constraints of life. Macro shots of the domestic, and the body creates a world the eye would not normally gaze upon.
Belfast Exposed High Street
What it's like (being me)
Jack Moyse
Jack Moyse is an artist from Swansea, Wales. His project What it’s like (being me) is an introspective documentary series following the life on a young adult coming to grips with the disability with which he was diagnosed at 17. His personal reflections form the basis of a narrative that encompasses some of the many issues people living with disabilities encounter including romance, parenthood and prejudice. Based primarily in photography, the project’s mixed media outcomes aim to create an immersive environment that provides insight for able bodied allies or those wanting to learn more about the lived disabled experience.
VOX HYBRIDA
Alice Maher with Emma Brennan and Chloe Austin
VOX HYBRIDA, on view in the Golden Thread Gallery from the 25th February to the 8th April is an exhibition by Alice Maher, featuring responsive artworks from Emma Brennan and Chloe Austin. Brennan and Austin, chosen by Maher, will be showing site specific video and performance art in February 2023 as part of the exhibition. Maher’s practice is dynamic, often utilising different media including painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography and installation. As one of Ireland most influential and respected artists, Alice Maher has continued to intrigue audiences with her provoking often corporeal drawings and sculptures. She works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory.
Salad Curse
Ekaterina Solomatina
‘Salad Curse’ is a mixed media art show which invites the audience to a confined place of anxiety and excitement, where a cursed creative mind seeks escape and relief. Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Irish folklore story about the mad king Sweeney Ekaterina creates a purgatorial part physical/ part virtual space within the walls of PS2. The audience is expected to discover the two-sides of genius, the liminal side which belongs with the beasts in the shadows and the other one that shines. Medieval king Sweeney was cursed to wander forever restless half bird-half human searching for peace, spiralling deeper down the curse. Follow him and see what a ‘salad curse’ feels like.
Arts For All
Svante Gullichsen
Svante Gullichsen is a Helsinki-based photographer whose work varies from strong Nordic and mystical atmospheres. Gullichsen, uses his photography to convey his understanding of the human mind and its challenges. For him, making photographs is a lifeline: a world where he can openly discuss his own sorrows and thoughts. He uses his work to talk about difficult and taboo subjects regarding the perception of the self. His ongoing projects have been telling a story about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Gullichsen's works within traditional portraiture, most of his photographs utilising the camera for performative self-portraits. Using himself as a model: the body is at the core of his works conveying the relation between human, nature and his disorder.
Arts For All
Morwenna Kearsley
Morwenna has been working on a Culture Collective residency in partnership with Street Level Photoworks (Glasgow) to develop opportunities for people to get involved in creative photography and video projects. Funded by Scottish Government emergency COVID-19 funds through Creative Scotland, the Culture Collective residencies provide support for creative freelancers to develop projects which are shaped by the communities in which they are rooted. FONDS comprises 25 (and counting) colour still life photographs. Each image represents an evocative object belonging to a local resident of Govanhill, a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual neighbourhood on the Southside of Glasgow. In collaboration with a local community newspaper, Greater Govanhill Magazine, local residents were invited to share an object that meant something special to them. Morwenna photographed each object on a large format camera using a long exposure of 8 minutes, the perfect amount of time for a short interview. From Kuwait to Brazil, Afghanistan to Romania the objects featured represent stories of migration, transformation, love, and resilience. Alongside creating a vibrant photographic archive of these objects, the project underscores our human desire to share stories, connect and learn from each other's cultures. The project was originally exhibited in local shops and cafes, was featured in Greater Govanhill Magazine and the participant's stories were also broadcast on a local radio station.
Clare Lyons
Clare Lyons is a visual artist and photographer working between Dublin and Belfast. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Belfast School of Art. Clare’s practice finds its concern in the tactile nature of the photographic image.
Emphasising the materiality of the photograph, she explores themes of memory, trauma and her personal struggles with mental illness. Considering the photograph as an object is integral to Clare's practice, and she has strived to develop methodologies which seek to draw attention to this through crafting, experimental printmaking, and working with an alternative approach to photographs. Often, for Clare, the image is not "enough" and additional interventions must be made with, to, or upon the surface of the image to tease out the difficult topics explored in her work. Clare’s practice tracks an autobiographical narrative where the artist has built a visual language to express the inexpressible. She is motivated by the hope to achieve catharsis through creating and making, and also to encourage a more healthy conversation surrounding the deep
